Featured Fellow: Charlotte Williams (2024-2025 William S. Willis, Jr. Short-Term Fellow)

The Library & Museum at the American Philosophical Society supports a diverse community of scholars working on a wide-range of projects in fields including early American history, history of science and technology, and Native American and Indigenous Studies, among others. Read on to learn more about some of our fellows and their research at the APS. Additional information about our fellowship programming and other funding opportunities can be found here.

Briefly describe your research project.

I research how American corporations and colonies engaged in archaeological work in Central America throughout the 20th century. My dissertation is on the role of the United Fruit Company in Maya archaeological excavations, but at the American Philosophical Society I also became fascinated by the role of the Panama Canal in facilitating archaeological shipments and exchanges.  

In the 1930s through the 1950s, prominent American archaeologists circulated through archaeological sites in Central America. Many sites, while somewhat protected by National laws, were ostensibly colonies of American imperialism, from the Panama Canal Zone, to plantations owned by the United Fruit Company, an American monopoly notorious for its land grabbing and sponsorship of US backed coups.

My project at APS ended up focusing on how American archaeologists not only excavated within these islands of American control, but also how they exchanged archaeological material between them. Following these systems of exchange, from private collections in Panama, to collections here in Philadelphia, we can see how American archaeologists negotiated and dictated ideas of monetary and cultural value with lasting consequences. 

What collections did you use while working at the APS?

I was mainly looking at the papers of John Alden Mason (1885–1967), a prominent American archaeologist who circulated between many Central American archaeological sites. I was mostly interested in his work at Sitio Conte, Panama, in 1940. But I also became fascinated by his correspondence with many collectors, archaeologists, and museums who were also interested in exchanging, buying, and sourcing collections from Panama.  I also read diaries that belonged to Sylvanus Morley, an archaeologist who worked at the Maya site of Quiriguá when it was owned and operated by the United Fruit Company. Both revealed a lot about the conditions of unequal labor at the American-operated sites, and also what infrastructures Americans were using to move around collections with minimal restrictions.

What’s the most interesting or most exciting thing you found in the collections?

There was so much! Mason often worked with a notorious archaeological looter, Juan Gratacos, who directly sold gold objects from Panama to a number of collectors and museums that Mason suggested. But there’s more! Panamanian and Isthmian gold objects were highly valuable not only historically, but also because they technically had bullion market value, they became highly susceptible to theft.

I found newspaper articles that revealed gold objects from Mexico and the Isthmian region that were stolen from the Penn Museum. One of the most fascinating series of correspondence was between the curator of the American Section at the Penn Museum, John Alden Mason, and a number of art auction houses, private collectors, and museums, trying to figure out the worth of the pieces in dollar amounts in order to post a number for a financial reward, what to claim in insurance, and where comparable pieces might be located. Conversations of this type reveal how American academics and art dealers were thinking about cultural value and market value, and how these economic systems became dangerously intertwined and reinforced. 

Do you have any tips or suggestions for future fellows or researchers?

Keep a running list of names and bios of characters that frequently come up in archival correspondence. This was incredibly helpful for me since people often referred to each other using nicknames or pseudonyms, especially if they were writing about the art market. Building a document with a character list means you can also draw relationships between them, and search other collections with various names or institutions that they were affiliated with that you may not have otherwise known. The archivists are so knowledgeable and the other fellows are working on so many topics that you may just find the same character appearing in their scholarship as well!

Any suggestions for must-see places or things to do in Philadelphia?

I would recommend the Schuylkill River Trail for bikers, which links up with an amazing Canal path in Manayunk that goes all the way to Conshohocken. Or keep that archival theme going and stop by the “Paper Trail” bike cafe in the middle of Wissahickon Park. Also, check out events at the Ministry of Awe, a new arts venue in a converted bank, just a stone’s throw away from APS. It’s the latest project of one of Phillly’s most famed mural artists, Meg Saligman. 

Charlotte Williams is a Mellon Democracy and Landscapes Initiative Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University (2024-2025) and a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research explores how archaeology as a discipline has been used in American Imperial projects, with a focus on how the United Fruit Company used archaeology to grow territorial power in Central America. Charlotte has worked on community museum projects in Belize and Peru, and co-curated an independent art exhibition in Philadelphia, Partage: the scars and sutures of the Colonial Museum (2023). Her work has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Smithsonian, and the Penn-Mellon "Dispossessions in the Americas" Just Futures research initiative.